This should help a bit more in making this file navigable.
I think there's further work that could be done to organize the
settings better: e.g., group LDAP with the auth section; separate
resource limits, from debugging and error reporting, from configuring
service dependencies like Redis and Rabbit. That'd require reordering
many settings, and also taking a closer look at many settings one by
one in order to do a good job. Leaving that for another day.
I've found this file hard to navigate for a while. We actually have a
little hierarchy of section headings which applies to a lot of the
file already; make the boundaries bolder.
Add a clear heading, and use fewer words and simpler sentences. Also
explain the password thing a bit more, and put that more inline next
to the username.
Also, on checking the Django docs, the default for EMAIL_USE_TLS
is False and for EMAIL_PORT is 25. So most admins, certainly any that
are using an SMTP service on the public Internet (that is at all
decently run), will need to set those settings. Mention that.
This comment didn't really explain things unless you were looking at
the code, and/or had a strong enough association for what "cn" means
that it was obvious what must be meant. Maybe this will be clearer.
There is one other meaningful key, which is optional: "short_name",
for which I guess a typical value if supplied would be "uid" or
"userid". I'm not sure we really do much with a user's `short_name`,
though, so didn't add a comment for it. When this key is omitted,
we set the user's `short_name` to the same thing as `full_name`.
Different formats for configuration files have a wide variety of ways
of representing lists; so if you're not accustomed to Python syntax,
or aren't thinking of this file as Python code, the syntax for several
ALLOWED_HOSTS entries may not be obvious. And this setting is one
that an admin is likely to want to touch quite early in using Zulip.
So, demonstrate a multi-element list.
For similar reasons, demonstrate an IP address. This one is in a
range reserved for documentation (by RFC 5737), like `example.com`.
Gmail is a bad example for outbound email; use a generic example.
Also leave the `= None` default out of the config file, as it's
redundant with DEFAULT_SETTINGS in our internal settings.py ; and
explain in the latter why we don't mention the other SMTP settings.
The warning here means that the admin can't really act on this yet if
they want to disable email auth, which is likely among admins that
want to make any changes here. And for admins who don't, this is an
extra thing to read and make a decision about before they can get a
server running. See #6985.
Conversely, we already discuss auth backends right at the top of the
`prod-customize` doc, which is linked under "Next steps" at the end of
these instructions.
The warning about EmailAuthBackend is important; but we can move it to
the config file right next to the setting, and then it's available
right when it's actionable, which is if the admin is actually thinking
about changing the setting.
For some historical reason we'd had the Postgres documentation on
valid SSL modes copied into the Zulip settings.py template file. This
fixes that historical artifact.
The control panel on the Google side doesn't seem to match the
instructions we have; it looks pretty 2017 to me, so I imagine
it's had a redesign since the instructions were written.
Also, in dev, EXTERNAL_HOST is now a port on zulipdev.com, not on
localhost.
Update these instructions for those developments, and edit lightly.
In dev, recommend setting in `dev_settings` instead of in
`prod_settings_template`; that feels to me a little more reflective of
the actual intent, and the effect should be equivalent.
This means one fewer thing the admin typically needs to read, absorb,
and make a decision about at install time.
The one way this change could hypothetically cause trouble is if the
admin wants to keep subdomains of EXTERNAL_HOST out of ALLOWED_HOSTS.
But while the subdomains often won't exist as domain names, it's hard
to imagine the situation in which they would exist but be under
someone else's control, or be doing something other than serving
Zulip realms.
The rules here are fuzzy, and it's quite possible none of Zulip's emails
need an address at all. Every country has its own rules though, which makes
it hard to tell. In general, transactional emails do not need an address,
and marketing emails do.
The original "quality score" was invented purely for populating
our password-strength progress bar, and isn't expressed in terms
that are particularly meaningful. For configuration and the core
accept/reject logic, it's better to use units that are readily
understood. Switch to those.
I considered using "bits of entropy", defined loosely as the log
of this number, but both the zxcvbn paper and the linked CACM
article (which I recommend!) are written in terms of the number
of guesses. And reading (most of) those two papers made me
less happy about referring to "entropy" in our terminology.
I already knew that notion was a little fuzzy if looked at
too closely, and I gained a better appreciation of how it's
contributed to confusion in discussing password policies and
to adoption of perverse policies that favor "Password1!" over
"derived unusual ravioli raft". So, "guesses" it is.
And although the log is handy for some analysis purposes
(certainly for a graph like those in the zxcvbn paper), it adds
a layer of abstraction, and I think makes it harder to think
clearly about attacks, especially in the online setting. So
just use the actual number, and if someone wants to set a
gigantic value, they will have the pleasure of seeing just
how many digits are involved.
(Thanks to @YJDave for a prototype that the code changes in this
commit are based on.)
This commit enables user to authenticate with any attribute set in
AUTH_LDAP_USER_SEARCH given that LDAP_EMAIL_ATTR is set to an email
attributes in the ldap server. Thus email and username can be
completely unrelated.
With some tweaks by tabbott to squash in the documentation and make it
work on older servers.
Since we're auto-detecting the value anyway, there's no reason it
can't be moved to DEFAULT_SETTINGS.
This lets us remove some clutter from the installation documentation.
This will allow for customized senders for emails, e.g. 'Zulip Digest' for
digest emails and 'Zulip Missed Messages' for missed message emails.
Also:
* Converts the sender name to always be "Zulip", if the from_email used to
be settings.NOREPLY_EMAIL_ADDRESS or settings.ZULIP_ADMINISTRATOR.
* Changes the default value of settings.NOREPLY_EMAIL_ADDRESS in the
prod_setting_template to no longer have a display name. The only use of
that display name was in the email pathway.
We used to use constructions like
from_email = "Zulip <%s>" % (settings.NOREPLY_EMAIL_ADDRESS,)
but no longer do. All references to settings.NOREPLY_EMAIL_ADDRESS in the
codebase now do not append a display name.
Greg Price
Tim Abbott
Reid Barton
Maarten Rijke
Rishi Gupta
Supermanu
vbNETonIce
Vaida Plankyte
Aditya Bansal
James Rowan
Pweaver (Paul Weaver)
Eklavya Sharma
Feorlen